After gaining a doctorate in philology at the University of Greifswald, Germany, in 1921, Auerbach served as librarian for the Prussian State Library. From 1929 until his dismissal by the Nazi Party in 1936, he was ordinarius university professor of Romance philology at the University of Marburg. From 1936 to 1947 Auerbach taught at the Turkish State University in Istanbul, where he wrote his magisterial survey of the linguistic means of depicting reality in European literature, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (1946; Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature). He joined the faculty at Yale University in 1947, becoming Sterling professor of Romance philology in 1956. In 1949–50 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J.

Although Auerbach wrote a number of important scholarly studies, including Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (1929; Dante, Poet of the Secular World) and Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (1958; Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages), his foremost work of literary criticism was Mimesis. This book not only offered philological and historical examinations of individual literary works, from the Hebrew Bible and Homer to Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, but also established an influential critical method, offering a history of culture through the close analyses of literary styles.

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